Advocating a Virtuous Voluntaryism

The Neocon And I, Part One

I realize it is a little late in the season to be blogging about Ron Paul, but I have been meaning to blog this for months and have only now gotten around to it. Below is the first part of a relatively brief email exchange I had with a friend of mine. My Ron Paul supporting friends and I like to refer to him as “the Neocon”. Never to his face, of course, as he told us, even before we started calling him that, not to call him one. I addressed him by his first name in the original email, but to protect him and myself, will refrain from doing so here. It all started when two fellow PaulBots and I were chilling with him at his house, playing one of the Halo* games (Don’t ask how that turned out.). We even bought him a pizza. But then we started talking politics. He made his feelings known about Ron Paul. Polite though we were, we let him know he was full of it. It didn’t really get nasty at all, and in the end we just agreed to disagree. The next day I composed this email because I felt I hadn’t adequately defended my stance the night before. This is from January 13, 2012, before I started using WordPress (though I was on Tumblr, where the links I sent him went originally).

Here are a few things I have written myself. Explanations…

Why Ron Paul’s apparent lack of support for Israel and indifference to Iran are not what they seem. (He was the ONLY Congressman in 1981 to vote against the resolution condemning Israel for actions it had taken to prevent a nuclear strike by Iraq). (Current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and recent Mossad Director Meir Dagan both think that US involvement in the Israel-Iran conflict would be foolish).

Why one can hold the government partially accountable for 9/11 without being a “truther”.

Why drug decriminalization on the federal level is not equivalent to drug legalization nation-wide.

I hope I deleted all the parts where I accused everyone that questions Ron Paul of being a Neocon. LOL.

I am much better at stating my piece (and the other guys will attest to this) with a keyboard than with my own voice. I have a tendency to ramble on, stutter, make incoherent statements, and lose my temper. But give me a pen and paper or a mouse and a keyboard, and my thoughts will flow freely.

Cheers,

Hank

PS

I could go on as well about the “legalized” assassination and detaining without charge of American citizens, the former of which is expressly forbidden even in times of war, and the latter restricted only to times of war, and then, only temporarily. The fact is that we are NOT in a state of war. We have not declared one. This gives the policy makers the best of both worlds. They can pretend we are at war and use it to justify all sorts of power-grabs, and then they can pretend we are not at war, and therefore the rules of war do not apply in our military campaigns against “combatants”.

It is also worth noting that Ron Paul has stated, on numerous occasions, that he would, as President, go to war with any country that the Congress legally declares one on, and would fight to win, force our enemies to make concessions, and then leave, even if he personally objected to the purpose or justification of that war. It is the Executive’s job, on all fronts, and in all times, to enforce the law. When he ceases to do this or goes outside of this, he is no better than a criminal. That is why a Formal Declaration of War, i.e., a piece of legislation, is crucial.